


What Does a Movie Fandom Look Like?

by Franzeska



Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2018-12-19 13:26:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11898696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: Shipping trends in movie fandoms over time





	1. What I'm Investigating

There was a lot of discussion a while back about the precipitous fall in the number of new Stormpilot fanworks on AO3. We argued about whether behavior in the fandom and/or racism were driving people away from Stormpilot and towards Kylux. Regardless of where we came down on that issue, we all agreed on one thing: The drop off in Stormpilot activity was anomalous.

_Is it?_

We didn't have any basis for thinking so--or at least _I_ wasn't basing that idea on data. I was assuming that popularity breeds popularity, and a juggernaut tends to roll on under its own steam. Anecdotally, I have the impression that big TV show ships do work like that, slowly gaining followers as new canon comes out. At the same time, we all know that movie fandoms tend to be a flash in the pan: tons of excitement and activity one month and gone the next. Why did we assume that TFA would be different? Because it's a series movie? Because it's in a massive franchise? Because we felt like our ship _ought_ to stay popular?

Recently, I was looking at a graph of TFA fandom activity and realized that almost all of the ships, big and small, followed the same pattern. They peaked in the same month. They fell in the same months. They grew in the same months. Kylux was a strange outlier, but Stormpilot was not; it was just so much more popular than other ships that its falloff was more noticeable.

That got me wondering if other fandoms look the same.

As of this writing, I don't have much of a conclusion, or even a hypothesis, just an avenue of investigation. We'll see what I come up with as I gather more data.


	2. Data Collection & Fandom Selection

**How the Data were Generated:**

To see activity over time, I decided to use AO3's advanced search to search for the number of works updated in a given month. I'm not using a bot to scrape data, so doing it daily would be too much work. I have noticed that, on checking my data, some numbers have already shifted. I have noticed that there are months where 1 work should show, but it doesn't via this search method. Is that because backdating doesn't count? Is it because that work doesn't properly show up in the results for that pairing tag and needs to be reindexed? So I'd take the exact numbers with a grain of salt. What interests me is the overall patterns, and these are likely still represented accurately, especially for pairings with high activity levels.

I did not worry about distinguishing between fic and other fanworks. I'll go back and forth between saying "works" and "fic" in this meta since most AO3 works are fic. The podfic, vids, meta, etc. don't make enough difference to the overall numbers to matter for this analysis.

**Fandom Selection:**

My experience of TFA fic fandom early on was that lots of people were treating it like a standalone in terms of how much they knew about Star Wars. A lot of the shipping activity centered around new characters. On the other hand, we already knew we'd be getting sequels with Finn, Rey, et al., and the wider Star Wars fandom has been going strong forever. Kylux has entered the pantheon of ~inexplicable whitecock~ ships based on two seconds of canon interaction. TFA came out when AO3 was well established.

For comparison, I looked for fic-writing fandoms that fit some of the following criteria:

  * Based primarily on a film
  * Large enough to have dozens or hundreds of works updating in the same month
  * Got popular after AO3 was established
  * Prone to shipping
  * Contains a notorious pairing based on limited screen time



Many of my candidates are part of franchises or are based on prior media. I tried to choose fandoms where the shippy fic fandom really got kicked off by a specific film in the overall franchise. I avoided small fandoms because it's hard to see a meaningful trend when only a couple of fics update per month.

AO3 opened to closed beta in October 2008. Open beta started in November 2009. It took a couple of years for it to get really popular though. A fandom from 2010 would have more track record to look at. On the other hand, a fandom from 2012 would have an AO3 presence that is more representative of the overall activity in that fandom. (Well, probably. IME, certain kinds of het are still more likely to be on ff.net.)

So, for example, I did not look at Shadowhunters/Mortal Instruments because it has a large book and TV show fandom but a small movie fandom. I did not look at The Phantom Menace fandom and its Obi/Qui juggernaut because fic on AO3 was imported long after the fandom's heyday. Same with the LOTR films.

I _did_ pick The Losers because the fandom got into the earlier comic through the movie, not vice versa, and the fandom is still based primarily on the film. I did pick the Guy Ritchie Holmes movies because the first one didn't come out till Christmas 2009, after AO3's open beta started, and Holmes/Watson is the sort of thing that was highly popular with AO3 early adopters.

The Hobbit has been popular forever, but the part that writes lots of shippy fic sprang up around the movies. Inception fandom was heavily on LJ, but it's a famous enough "Did they even talk to each other?!" ship with enough AO3 presence that I wanted to include it. Clint/Coulson is part of the massive MCU franchise, but it came out of Thor and Avengers, long before Coulson was a regular on a TV show, and it's another notorious three-minutes-of-screen-time ship.

James Bond fandom, even its fic fandom, has had many incarnations. I remember the little GoldenEye slash fandom from back in the day. (Sounding with a custom-made fake swizzle stick? I salute you, author, and your commitment to James Bondian cocktail jokes.) I wouldn't normally have included anything with Alec Trevelyan, but I'm informed that most of the AO3 fic is actually weird fanon Trevelyan who developed as part of Bond/Q fanon, and Bond/Q comes from Skyfall in 2012.

It's obvious that the time since the canon was released is a huge factor in fic production. I also got the sense that time of year made a difference, so I did a search of all AO3 activity to compare to single-fandom activity.

In the end, the movie fandoms I felt were most interesting to compare were these:

  * RDJ Holmes films (2009)
  * Inception (2010)
  * The Losers (2010)
  * MCU around Thor/Avengers (2010-11)
  * Skyfall (2012)
  * Pitch Perfect (2012)
  * The Hobbit (2012)
  * Pacific Rim (2013)
  * Kingsman (2014)
  * Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
  * The Man from U.N.C.L.E. film (2015)
  * Fantastic Beasts (2016)
  * Ghostbusters (2016)
  * Rogue One (2016)
  * Zootopia (2016)



Are there glaring omissions here? What fandoms would you look at?


	3. Time of Year and Fic Posting on AO3

[](https://franzeska.dreamwidth.org/file/67511.png)

AO3 has gotten consistently more and more popular, but if you look at it by month rather than just sequentially, a seasonal pattern emerges. It looks like events such as the beginning of the school year around September and holidays and family obligations around November decrease posting. Time off around December and during July/August increases it.


	4. TFA Fandom Trends

I thought it was interesting how closely the big and small ships' trends resemble each other, aside from Kylux and Clan Techie/Matt the Radar Technician (i.e. cracky AU Kylux).

The film came out in mid-December. There was a huge burst of fannish activity in January, then a rapid fall-off. Other little bursts happened around May, December, and July, which are all times that AO3 shows an increase in posting. I conclude that the January activity was influenced by the film having just come out, but enough time having elapsed that people were able to finish their fics, but the later patterns have more to do with seasonal posting patterns than anything fandom-specific. It would be interesting to see a day-by-day analysis from mid-December to mid-February for the big TFA ships.

I also wondered if Stormpilot trends were affected by it being a background ship in fic that has another primary pairing. This happens in a bunch of Rey/Jess fic, but there's not so much of that, so I just excluded Kylux and Reylo. It doesn't look to me like there's much influence.


	5. Graphs of Other Movie Fandoms




	6. Analysis of Single-Fandom Graphs

 


	7. Star Wars Shipping Post-TLJ

Here are the Star Wars numbers as of early February. The massive spikes don't necessarily mean that there is more activity after TLJ than after TFA: This only measures how many fics were _last_ updated in a given month, and I got my TFA data long after the movie was out, so the initial peaks in the graph are lower than the actual activity level. It will be interesting to see what the numbers from January look like in another month or two.

The first big thing I notice here is that all ships got a bump in activity from a new movie coming out. Even ships like Jessika/Rey got a tiny bump. The second thing I notice is that Kylux activity has been trending downward for a long time. I wonder whether it will have another plateau like after TFA or if it will start looking more like the typical movie ship pattern with a rapid fall-off. Reylo has always been very popular in fandom at large, but its popularity on AO3 is way, way up. (Not exactly a surprise given TLJ.) 


End file.
